When Cold Showers Fail

Author's Frank Talk Addresses Tough Issue For Single Christians

January 01, 2004|By MICHAEL D. WAMBLE Daily Press

Ty Adams wants to talk in church about sex.

Not just the intercourse shared by a man and a woman in bonds of marriage, but premarital sex.

Adams, a Detroit evangelist and author, wants to talk about various forms of sexual acts -- at times in descriptive ways -- to single out the struggles of unmarried Christians who may feel either too uncomfortable or too ashamed to admit they engage in sex.

"God gave you a sex drive," Adams said during a December interview on "Gospel Express," a radio show on Hampton University's WHOV-FM (88.1), "so stop praying for it to go away.

"Cold showers don't work, baby," she said. "I've taken them. Got out of the shower. And was still horny." That's because, she said, "until God gives you a new body, you're going to have sexual urges."

Sexual desires don't go away the second after a Christian makes a profession of faith, Adams said. They need constant attention. That's why she urges single Christians to live without sex.

Adams, 31, believes that the reluctance of most churches -- especially those in the black community -- to speak frankly about those sexual urges has limited their ability to reach out to teens and young adults in need of guidance.

Without that ability to connect, the negative consequences of sex can alter young lives forever through deadly diseases like AIDS and through unplanned pregnancies. But for Adams, there is a fate much worse: to be spiritually disconnected from the word of God.

To prevent that disconnection, she dares to be provocative. And it's working.

Adams first gained exposure locally when WHOV station manager Robert Dixon II interviewed her on the air in October to promote her book, "Single, Saved and Having Sex."

Since that interview, phones at local bookstores have been ringing as people inquire about Adams' book. A sales clerk at the Heaven & Earth bookstore in Hampton said she's received calls, "hundreds of them," about the book. The store doesn't have it. (At some stores, Barnes and Noble in Hampton, for example, the book has to be special ordered for customers.)

During an early December visit to Hampton, Adams squeezed in stops at WHOV studios and at Christ Church Ministries in Hampton, all the while being trailed by a Christian Broadcasting Network television producer for a possible "700 Club" segment. Otherwise, Adams' book tour has been limited to engagements at universities in her home state of Michigan.

So the success of her book is mainly a product of word of mouth praise and Adams' Web site.

"Single, Saved and Having Sex" ranks second among nonfiction bestsellers at black-owned bookstores, according to the December issue of Essence Magazine. Adams said she's sold nearly 15,000 copies of the self-published book.

The title of her book is often misunderstood.

No, she does not believe that single, saved Christians should be having sex. She said she knows the consequences of such a lifestyle, intimately. But it is a subject, Adams said, that needs to be talked about.

Before turning her life over to God, she said she was "dying a slow spiritual death from sexual sin."

Striding down the aisles of Christ Church Ministries in Hampton during a recent Friday night program, Adams told the packed house that she knows what it's like to say you're saved on Sunday, but be sexually active every other day of the week.

"I used to come to church with a hotel room key in my pocket," Adams said. "I remember when men would enter me -- the shame and the torment. Now I get intimate with God."

The Gospels as Adams recounts them might be a bit hotter than typically thought. Adams' Jesus is a man whose inner and moral strength had to have been an aphrodisiac to the women of his time. She injects her own commentary into Bible stories like Jesus' visit among the women at the well.

"Don't think no hoes wasn't in Jesus' face?" Adams said.

"Come on, you know the man was fine. I know I'd be throwing myself at him," she said playfully.

"You so anointed. Give some water to me," Adams said in character, as she might have done to Jesus at the well.

"Jesus," Adams shouted.

"Thirty-three and celibate," she said. "What an example. What a man! Jesus is a real man."

Her unique interpretation of Scripture is contrasted by the vivid and sometimes humorous ways she describes how people struggle to overcome habits of sexual sin.

As she reminded her audience of more than 200 people: "I ain't for the pretty folks."

Ernestine Duncan, who brought members of the young women's ministry she directs at St. John the Baptist Church in Portsmouth, said Adams' voice is needed in churches.

"She has a shock value," Duncan said. "And that's good given that so much of our society is fast-paced. Unless you grab some attention, people get lost."

Premarital sex is "not only walking out on the will of God, but it opens young people up to diseases that could kill them," said Duncan, an assistant professor of psychology at Hampton University. She's researching HIV/AIDS prevention in black communities.